Wedding Shopping: Save the Dates

The first big style decision you’ll have to make for your wedding is what your Save the Date cards will look like. There are tons of services that have pre-made designs that can work for you and your wedding. Wedding Paper Divas came very highly recommended, as well as other services such as The American Wedding and Online Photo Magnets (for those of you who are interested in sending magnets). Each of these services provides a bunch of affordable price points and many options for styles and designs.

My wedding coordinator Aubrey also recommended a company in Bel Air, Maryland, for any locals who’d like to work with a custom stationery company. Here’s what she had to say about Preston’s Stationery:

I LOVE Preston’s!! Kim is awesome, creative and open to doing anything. She will sit with you and play with colors, paper styles, show samples, etc. She is also totally open to working within anyone’s budget.

While I appreciated all of the suggestions (and almost went with a design from Wedding Paper Divas), I opted for a simple postcard that I designed myself from Zazzle.com. However, many brides do much more clever things such as magnets, photos, or other trinkets. It all depends on your budget and how much time you plan on spending on your Save the Dates.

Besides the affordable cost (just about $65 for an order of 75 cards) I liked using Zazzle because I could lay the cards out how I wanted. They provided a background image template, to which I applied a simple black and light blue border. I used large, bold black text that draws attention to the names of the bride and groom, stated the date and location, and then added “formal invitations to follow” at the bottom. I think they came out pretty nice:

Save the Date postcard, from Zazzle.com

One small concern is that my Save the Date cards are probably not going to match my wedding colors or my invitations (both of which I am still very undecided about), but that doesn’t bother me so much. If that’s something that matters to you, I’d recommend going with Wedding Paper Divas or another full-service vendor so that you can have a continuous look and feel from your Save the Dates to your invitations to your programs, therefore encompassing your entire wedding day.

How did you put together your Save the Date cards? Were you happy with your decision?